IT Benchmarking

Automated Analysis Engine

At the core of the VMware® IT Benchmarking™ offering is the industry’s first Automated Analysis Engine. The engine contains purpose-built benchmarking methodologies reflecting deep IT finance expertise and thought leadership. The result: standardized, repeatable, actionable results at a level of detail and value unsurpassed by other traditional solutions. This unique automated system compares your IT infrastructure costs to those of your functional and industry peers and provides relevant benchmark information and actionable intelligence about where you are and where you could be. The Automated Analysis Engine:

Performs both industry and functional peer selection for the most reliable comparisons.

Superior Peer Selection for Relevant and Objective Comparisons

Most benchmarking engagements rely on industry-only data as the basis for comparison. This approach often leads to incorrect conclusions about where you really stand because it doesn’t take into consideration critical factors like comparative workload and complexity.

Functional peers provide a strong comparative by matching your IT footprint based on workload and complexity with an organization having a similar IT footprint. For example, in the Midrange Tower, the metrics listed below provide a strong indication of an organization’s IT footprint and a consistent way of viewing and comparing workload and complexity between organizations.

Workload - Quantifies the scope of labor being performed by an organization to support end users or the IT environment. Workload parameters are unique to each VMware tower being benchmarked and are critical in determining functional peers.

Complexity - Measures an organization’s unique requirements, which drive the relative ease or difficulty in supporting end users or the IT environment. Complexity parameters are also unique to each VMware tower being benchmarked and are critical in determining functional peers.

The Automated Analysis Engine engages multiple filtering processes to identify 5 to 15 functional peers based on these workload, complexity and aging factors. Peer averages are then normalized to your environment to achieve a true apples to apples comparison. When combined, industry and functional peer benchmarking provide the most reliable and actionable data for zeroing in on where to cut and where to protect.

Out-of-the-Box Reports for Actionable Intelligence

VMware Benchmarking engagements include robust, out-of-the-box reports that show the true cost and quality performance against industry and functional peers and provide actionable recommendations to close performance gaps. Results include peer comparison, functional peer top and bottom quartiles, industry average, industry top and bottom quartiles and database average.

The Standard Report

This Standard Report is an executive rollup of the benchmark results for each Tower covered in the benchmark. It contains powerful graphs and dozens of key metrics for each area compared against five different peer groups. This Standard Report is ideal as a baseline for informing recommendations, next steps and implementation plans.

The Extract Report

The comprehensive Extract Report Results are provided as a fully editable XLS document with hundreds of metrics for each Tower compared against workload, industry and global peer reviews across multiple areas. In addition, Extract Reports:

Facilitate the importing of data into client reports and systems.

Provide the ability to build custom reports from the data.

Have data mining capabilities not provided by traditional benchmarking companies or those provided at extremely high price points.

Enable granularity for drilling down and understanding the “why” of specific cost and performance metrics.